The Last Worldbuilding Tool You’ll Ever Need

As a writer with a strong connection to the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, worldbuilding is nothing new to me. For the past two decades I’ve explored numerous avenues searching for the perfect worldbuilding tool. I’ve jotted notes down on post-its and arranged them on my bedroom door as a teen. I’ve bought and received as gifts journals and notebooks, some of them beautifully bound by leather or llama skin and used them. I had binders with annotated pages. I’ve built up spreadsheets, and there is an entire series of folders on my Google Drive account filled with assorted notes and different aspects of all the worlds I’ve built. I’ve also gone so far as to install a local instance of MediaWiki on my home PC just so I could keep my worldbuilding notes private. However, as a worldbuilding tool, each of these options came with problems.

Journals and binders could be lost, pages torn out or otherwise ruined. Spreadsheets and document files become hard to manage. MediaWiki worked wonderfully, but it was a pain to install and configure properly, and you had to learn the Wiki Markup language in order to use effectively.

What is World Anvil?

Designed as a worldbuilding tool to be utilized by fantasy, science fiction and horror writers and tabletop RPG campaign designers, World Anvil takes the most complicated aspects of worldbuilding and makes them easy to manage through an intuitive category-and-field system. It allows worldbuilders to create every aspect of their world, from the widest universe to the smallest atom, and links associated items together, and then compiles them all in an easily-traversable series of web pages, complete with all relevant information.

When designing an article, World Anvil’s system offers you a series of prompts with which you can further flesh out whatever aspect of your world you happen to be working on. If you’re, for instance, designing a character, World Anvil will prompt you not just on physical characteristics of your character such as age, height, eye or hair color, but further explores the character’s personal likes & dislikes, health condition, virtues, flaws, quirks and hygienic practices. But characters are only one aspect of what World Anvil offers. There are dozens more.

World Anvil users can upload maps of their worlds and annotate them through use of an API, connect markers to articles on settlements, and customize said markers however they wish, cementing World Anvil as a robust worldbuilding tool. They can upload pictures, headers and all manner of other things to the site.

Creation Features of World Anvil

World Anvil Creation Tools

Buildings: Allows for the creation of detailed buildings, attach buildings to settlements, owners and organizations, as well as multiple prompts to add extra details.

Characters: An incredibly robust form to build characters with multiple fields and prompts with which to create incredibly detailed, fleshed-out characters and their history. Also allows the creator to assign relationships to other characters.

Conditions: Allows for the creation of diseases and other maladies, whether they be natural, magical or technological in nature.

Documents: Does the religion in your setting have a central document? Create it, tell it’s history and even insert the content of said document. Useful for everything from religious texts to contracts and bills of sale.

Ethnicities: An option to create different ethnicities within your world, which can be applied to your characters and geographical regions.

Formations (Military): Is your world thick with military conflict? In here, you can create unique military formations, outline their ideologies, drives and tactics.

Generic Articles: On the off chance there isn’t a category for what you’re trying to create, World Anvil has you covered with the Generic Article.

A Robust Worldbuilding Tool

I took to the World Anvil worldbuilding tool like a duck to water. After a few hours of messing around, I even joined their Guild membership program. Now, it’s important to note that while the free account is functional, there are limitations. For instance, with the free account you can only create two worlds, and they must be accessible by anyone. As someone who guards most of their worldbuilding jealously, I needed to have the option to set a world to private until such time as I was ready to release it to the public.

Additionally, the map API features are scaled back with the free membership, as well as many other advanced customization features, such as the ability to co-author worlds and to have subscribers, or upload larger files.

The good news? These features can be unlocked starting at only $3 USD per month, and I recommend that for the serious worldbuilder they go for the $5 tier at a minimum. It unlocks numerous useful features.

So go check out World Anvil, and share your creations in the comments below.

If there is enough interest, we may engage in a series of articles chronicling the creation of a brand new world making use of the World Anvil worldbuilding tool!

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